Once upon a time, a big-wig publisher offered a bet to a writer-illustrator.

$50 said he couldn't come up with an entire children's book that used just 50 words.

Theodore Geisel accepted the challenge,

wrote the book under his pen name,

and pocketed 50 bucks, presumably.

That was 1960.

And since then, green eggs and ham

has sold an estimated 200 million copy.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd. Whether you like that book,

in a box with a fox, or your adult ears find it grading, it is hard to deny the hypnotic

hold of just a few dozen rhyming words cleverly repeated in one absurd little story. Those

artificial limits didn't make the job easy. The writer known as Dr.

Sue spent months perfecting the book, but they almost certainly turbocharged his creativity.

And my guest has discovered enough similar examples to convince him that parameters might just

be the key to productivity. David Epstein is a journalist and author. His new book is called Inside the Box,

How Constraints Make Us Better. David, welcome to think. Thank you very much for having me.

You share that this book contains a lot of me search, by which you mean you wanted to understand

the reasons your career has been propelled by limitations? Yeah, exactly.

And I also wanted to be better at setting boundaries, to be honest.

So in many ways, I was researching things I needed help with.

For example, with my first two books, I wrote about 150% the length of a book

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